A Look at the Persistent Rumors About a 4K Display in the Samsung Galaxy S8

There are tons of rumors floating around about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 flagship phone for 2017 and since Samsung itself never got around to revealing much about their highly anticipated smartphone at CES 2017, the speculation has done the opposite of calm down. Obviously enough, here at 4K.com, our main focus on the phone’s specs revolves around the possibility of an ultra HD display or camera and the sorts of processing specs that will support that many pixels smoothly, but there’s plenty of other cool stuff to cover about this upcoming device.

For starters, in an October 27th report from the WSJ, Samsung’s VP of mobile technology, Lee Jae-yong, was cited by the newspaper as stating that the S8 will come out with a “slick design and improved camera” along with assorted AI improvements. Right from these vague statements, rumors started circulating about the kind of improved AI that the new Galaxy S8 would sport. Will it be an enhanced version of Google’s existing Android system? Or will we see an entirely new intelligent platform courtesy of developments from Viv Labs, the AI development startup that created Siri from Apple’s iPhones, and which has been acquired by Samsung as of recently.

Then there was a December 5th report which claimed that Samsung could end up putting in a set of hardcore (for a smartphone) stereo speakers into the S8’s body. This because Samsung has also acquired the legendary Harman Audio brand. To bolster these specific audio rumors, we also have anonymous sources from the website FoneArena who claimed that there will indeed be a stereo speaker array in the Galaxy S8 and that it will at least be good enough to give some serious competition to Apple’s iPhone 7.

Then again, all of the above is highly speculative but it’s at least credible in terms of phone development progression and Samsung’s own tangle of technology ownership.

Moving onto some further and more resolution-related rumors, we have another report from the very next day, December 6th from SamMobile, claiming that the S8 will be a phone with a Super AMOLED screen with an enhanced RGB pixel color structure for delivery of high quality QHD resolution. This of course means that the phone won’t be coming with native 4K display and quite frankly, we’re leaning more towards QHD being the plausible resolution option in the device.

EDGE design concept for the Galaxy S8

This report goes into further details by explaining that the screen of the S8 will be a next-generation OLED panel with higher efficiency than that of existing Samsung phone designs. Furthermore, it’s claimed that the S8 will come in two different sizes of 5.7 inches and a hefty 6.2 inches, both of which will come with Samsung EDGE technology but neither of which is likely to have 4K display. Instead, the report leans towards QHD once again. Again, given the problems and overkill of putting 4K resolution on a relatively tiny phone screen, QHD makes much more sense even for a company that loves 4K resolution in its monitorsand TVs most of all. Besides, since none of the competition on the market today is visibly pushing for a 4K flagship phone display in the immediate future, Samsung has little incentive to go in that direction for now.

Whether the Samsung Galaxy S8 phone goes with 4K display or not, we can be absolutely sure that it’s going to come with some awesome software and AI features as well as one absolutely kick-ass camera, if the Samsung offerings of 2016 or general phone camera development trends are anything to go by. This of course absolutely means a camera with 4K video recording capacity of a fairly decent sort and as a result, this 2017 phone will definitely need some serious processing power to keep thinks ticking along smoothly.

With this in mind, we come to the (in our view more concrete) rumors about these kinds of specs in the S8. From what we’re hearing, the S8 is going to be an absolute monster in terms of processor power and this conclusion is only natural given how much the latest flagship phones have already advanced.

Thus, we’re looking forward to the possibility of Qualcomm’s upcoming powerhouse Snapdragon 835 CPU technology, which features superior battery life handling, much better power, DSLR-level photo processing and incidentally, the ability to handle 4K UHD graphics in camera video and in display if the phone does indeed come with an ultra HD 4K screen resolution.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 features

On the other hand, different rumors from the Chinese social media website Weibo are instead claiming that Samsung will forego Qualcomm processing technology in favor of its own native Exynos processor chips. The number being guessed at is 8995, as a successor to the existing Exynos 8990 processing chips.

With the reported new Exynos technology, the S8 will sport a processor that’s built in a far more efficient 10nm FinFET architecture instead of the current 14nm FinFET size in 8990 chips.

Whichever chipset goes into the Galaxy S8, it will at least have to support some seriously robust 4K camera technology, a QHD display and all the fancy AI features that the S8 will undoubtedly come packed with.

Thanks for reviewing the Samsung Galaxy S8. I am a Samsung fan all throughout my life so I am really excited about the launch of the S8. After the debacle of Galaxy Note 7, I hope Samsung can live up to the expectations of the people.

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